Please forgive the egotistical title for this blog-entry, but my inner cheer is too buoyant to repress. I’ve been banging on about the lack of theological seriousness in the Church, the creeping managerialism, and the effect it has on clergy morale for a long time – and focussed all those concerns on the women bishops question here. In the aftermath of the Synod debacle, Professor Sarah Coakley, who is an all round star, weighs in here. Go read.
Category Archives: autobiography
Is it time to abandon ship?
Some good conversation around the topic of ministry happening here and here. This is by way of a brief aside, following on from a good chat with a clergy friend last week.
My question is: is it too late to save the good ship CofE? I ask this because it seems that if it was going to be possible to reform the system to make it viable, it would have happened by now. The analysis of the problems that we are facing are not new (indeed, I recently discovered that the root problem was diagnosed over EIGHTY YEARS AGO!). For someone who considers themselves profoundly Anglican – as I do – the naturally desirable course of action is to stay and try and change things for the better. Yet I cannot escape Leonard Cohen’s mordant commentary, “they sentenced me to twenty years of boredom… for trying to change the system from within”. It occurs to me that if it was possible to change the system from within – through incremental shifts – then it would have been done already. The generation of priests ordained in the sixties and seventies were, I suspect, not given any more or less grace than the present generation – and there were many more of them – so why the tacit assumption that ‘one more heave’ might make any difference? In other words, I think that the rot has gone much deeper than any possible structural reform can address. We no longer have the capacity to make the right decisions, because our spiritual strength has been exhausted – and it is that spiritual strength which is my principal concern.
Which leads to the second, supplementary question – is it possible to be a priest in the CofE any more? The generating and nurturing of spiritual strength is, after all, the core role of the priest. At least I think it is – the idea that the main task of the priest is the cure of souls; that this is a distinct and important (most important!) task; that this is what priests are called to and paid for and enabled to carry out; that this is, in fact, something into which someone can be formed – all this seems to be structurally forgotten, and only referenced in rhetoric at ordinations. In actual practice, what a priest is for is to keep the wheels of the institution turning – and the worst sin is not a failure of spiritual cure but to bring the institution into disrepute. As I have said elsewhere, incumbency drives out priesthood – and the future that we are staring it is the exaltation of incumbency.
It seems to me that if there is to be any future for the Church of England it will involve ‘giving up’ – giving up an illusion of centralised control, that if only we get in the right leaders doing the right programs then all shall be well (and in saying that, I’m conscious of taking the precisely opposite conclusion to David Keen). It will involve setting parishes free, and it will involve setting priests free – free to actually be priests, and not establishment functionaries. What I’m pondering is a way of handing over all ‘incumbency’ rights and responsibilities to local laity – to revive lay incumbencies no less (which is not the same as lay presidency!) – and to only have ‘mission priests’ – people whose responsibility it was to feed the faithful by word and sacrament and nothing else. The institutions keep loading on other options onto the creaking shoulders of the clergy and they are almost all distractions from the core task. It is because we no longer know what a priest is for that we have devised an institution that makes it impossible to actually be a priest within it.
Which is what I mean by abandoning ship. I want to deploy my favourite quotation from MacIntyre in this context too: ““A crucial turning point in history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead — often not recognizing fully what they were doing — was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness… This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”
Is it time for priests of good will to turn aside from shoring up the CofE and start constructing new forms of Anglican community?
What is to be done?
I read this in an article from the Guardian:
“I teach 400 children. Slightly more, actually, but we’ll call it 400. That means your daughter counts for 0.25% of the children I teach. It is difficult for me to honestly and accurately tell you anything about her, so please forgive me if I speak in vague generalities at parents’ evening and try to avoid using your daughter’s name. I might have forgotten it.
I teach twenty five lessons a week. Despite my best intentions, some of these lessons are boring. To plan an outstanding lesson can take hours. I can’t do that for every lesson I teach. Sometimes I stand in class delivering a lesson I know isn’t as good as it could be. I know how to make it better. I just didn’t have the time to do it. I don’t think the children notice, they are used to this…
Schools are full of middle-management types….The school needs to improve, but I’m not sure it can. Common sense and trust in human communication is being forced out of the profession. A lot of teachers seem to like being told exactly what to do and how to do it. The status quo is just fine for a lot of middle and senior management too. It allows them to wield power, justify inflated salaries and be recognised by their peers as being “outstanding” teachers. A recognition the children in their classes would never give them. Never mind. They never really liked teaching children that much anyway.”
The reason why this article struck me this morning is that – if you change the relevant terms (including ‘outstanding teacher’ to ‘senior priest’!) then the same analysis applies to the life of an increasing number of parish priests. That is of interest, not because I want to share in the groaning – done enough of that recently – but because it shows how far the Church of England has become bound up in the prevailing patterns of our culture.
That culture is one of expecting more and more to be achieved by less and less – and of putting bureaucratic control systems in place to achieve it. So, in teaching, it means a significant increase in central government direction and intervention, carried through by qualified consultants and enforced by Ofsted. Similar things happen in other fields, like the NHS. The church – being behind the times – is only now starting to move in this direction, but it is clear that Common Tenure is from this stable, and this pattern of thought has clearly infected many.
I say that with confidence because I think it has also infected me – and I’m trying to extirpate it (which I do, through things like writing out my thoughts in a blogpost). For example, I am closely involved in Deanery discussions planning for the future – specifically, how to negotiate a reduction in stipendiary clergy of around a third (from 13.5 to 9, covering 27 parishes). My first reaction was to develop a plan to restructure the Deanery around geographical clusters, each with at least two clergy, so that the workload is distributed fairly. So, from an average ratio of clergy to people of 1:120, it will shift to around 1:180; or, using a Deployment Indicator that takes account of local population and number of churches, it will shift from an average of 101 per priest to an average of 144 per priest – either way, it will effectively mean a 50% increase in workload for clergy here. (For comparison, and in lieu of another moan from me, the figures for Mersea are 1:300 on the former measure, and 186 on the latter, so I do have a very good idea of what these implied changes mean in practice). Yet as time has gone on, I become more and more dubious about this type of change – the notion of spreading clergy around in a perfectly balanced distribution seems simply to be about managing the decline.
What, after all, will be the consequences of proceeding with this plan? We will be asking clergy (and bishops) to do more and more with less and less – exactly the situation that the teacher in the Guardian article is describing. We will end up either with ever-increasing levels of clergy burn-out; or with ever-increasing congregational decline and disillusionment; or, most probably, both. This is exactly the pattern of thinking that led us into our present problems, so why do we expect a different result from continuing with it?
So what is to be done? One answer is to ‘re-imagine ministry’ – along the lines that Bishop Stephen is calling for here in Chelmsford Diocese. I strongly support what +Stephen is attempting to do, but I suspect that we are still not digging down into the real roots of the problem. Do we: change our understandings of priesthood; change our understandings of lay ministry; or – increase the numbers of clergy?
After all, one of the great challenges about ‘re-imagining ministry’ is to make sure that we don’t re-imagine ministry away completely. The reason why Killing George Herbert has always resonated with me is simply because the George Herbert model of ministry is so tremendously attractive. To be a pastor and a teacher building up strong relationships with a group of disciples – and through that to enable each of them to live out their calling with joy and giving glory to God – what priest could possibly object to that? If we are to have a truly enabled and energised, inspired and inspiring laity – is there not a role there for those whose job it is to help such a thing come about? That is, I am not sure that the answer to the problem of a shortage of clergy is to do away with such clergy altogether. The answer is two-fold, it seems to me – we need more clergy and we need to have a much clearer idea of what clergy are for.
In the secular world, to provide resources for training and development is straightforward and obvious. It is an investment in the future. The Church of England doesn’t do this – and I sometimes wonder if there is something in our ecclesiology that says we are only allowed to take the bad bits of management practice and have to ignore the good. If we were serious about priestly ministry then we would invest a much greater proportion of our resources in training and developing priests – and we would then set those priests free to do the work that they have been called and trained to do. There are many ways in which this might be done. Personally I am coming around to the view that anyone accepted for training should be installed as a curate in a parish, with housing and a stipend, and then spend the next seven years doing 50% work in the parish and 50% formational training. I am very aware of the benefits of full-time residential training, but that model only really works with people who are single, and probably young as well.
More crucially, I believe that we need to make a decision about what we expect priestly ministry to look like. This is a long conversation but one key element of it, surely, has to do with the size of the congregation – that is, how many people is one priest expected to pastor? Bob Jackson’s research pertains to this – for me, I would suggest a ball-park figure of around 100 as the limit for what one person can effectively minister to. Beyond that number the possibility of genuine relationships with each member of a congregation diminishes exponentially. If something like this is accepted, then it has a direct implication for the recruitment and training of clergy. If we have 10,000 people needing to be pastored, then we will need 100 clergy, and we will need to ask each of those 10,000 people to give 1% of their income in order to pay for them. All that is happening now is that we are a long way into the spiral of decline that spreading butter over too much bread inevitably causes. Put another way, we need to abandon the use of the Sheffield formula and its equivalents in working out how to deploy clergy.
Personally, I don’t believe that this challenge can ever be met without at the same time addressing the folly of the parish share system. That is, without some sense of direct relationship between what parishioners give, and what they receive there will be no chance of increasing – that is, financing – the necessary numbers of clergy. Of course, this immediately runs up against some of the principal taboos of church culture – taboos which are, sadly, principally twentieth century in origin. After all, one of the roots of the blight of management culture across the different areas of our lives is the huge growth in centralised state control – and the parish share system is simply one aspect of that, as applied to the church. The sort of system that I would like to see – benefices tithing their income, then paying for the costs of their own ministers – is a massively decentralising process. I happen to believe, not only that this is the form that the Spirit prefers, but also that it is in profound harmony with the way that the world is developing at the moment. Yet like all release of centralised power, those who hold such power will not release it voluntarily, they will have to be persuaded by non-rational means.
Essentially, what I am describing is the shift from maintenance to mission – and in saying that, I am depressingly aware of what a cliche it is. I am sure this has all been said before, and much more articulately. So the question becomes – why has there been no change? Why is it that we are still circling the plug-hole? I believe that the answer is to do with our capacity to make decisions. To actually address these issues properly requires painful choices to be made, and it is the incapacity to make those choices which is our fundamental problem. I don’t believe that we can escape from the truth that the church is in crisis because it has lost its spiritual moorings – and this has led to our culture being in crisis (see my book for more detail). We can’t discriminate between good and bad management because that requires spiritual discernment – and in an environment that doesn’t take spirituality seriously (the church) that sort of discernment is not encouraged as it is too challenging to the existing powers.
So what is to be done? I hear the words that say ‘leave with the others’, to which I want to respond to the church ‘but you have the words of eternal life’. What can those who are loyal to the CofE actually do? That is, what do those who actually believe in the gospel as the Church of England has received it do when that very same Church becomes the obstacle to the proclamation of the gospel? I think that my heart’s desire is to do the work of a Samuel, and change the structures in such a way that it becomes possible for the priests to do their job once again. Yet in my darker moments I wonder whether what is truly needed isn’t a Samuel but a Samson – someone to pull down the pillars of establishment and leave nothing but rubble and dead bodies behind.
When will I ever learn?
Whatever it takes to fulfil his mission
That is the way we must go
But you’ve got to do it in your own way
Tear down the old, bring up the new
And up on the hillside it’s quiet
Where the shepherd is tending his sheep
And over the mountains and valleys
The countryside is so green
Standing on the highest hill with a sense of wonder
You can see everything is made in God
Head back down the roadside and give thanks for it all
When will I ever learn to live in God?
When will I ever learn?
He gives me everything I need and more.
When will I ever learn?
When will I ever learn?
Whatever it takes to fulfil his mission
That is the way we must go
But you’ve got to do it in your own way
Tear down the old, bring up the new
And up on the hillside it’s quiet
Where the shepherd is tending his sheep
And over the mountains and valleys
The countryside is so green
Standing on the highest hill with a sense of wonder
You can see everything is made in God
Head back down the roadside and give thanks for it all
When will I ever learn to live in God?
When will I ever learn?
He gives me everything I need and more.
When will I ever learn?
Just a few songs
This Cohen song is the one that I referred to obliquely yesterday:
One of the leading contenders for ‘my favourite Show of Hands song’:
The last song that I sang in church. Might sing another one yet.
And finally…
Address to West Mersea APCM 2012
I hope you are sitting comfortably. On Easter Sunday this year I had the great privilege of presiding at a service of Holy Communion at the Methodist Church here on the Island. I came away with two somewhat contradictory feelings – the first was that our differences are really very trivial, the second was: I quite like our differences! And that’s OK. Yes, it is a scandal that there are different churches and different denominations all proclaiming that they love the Lord in their own unique and special way – and yes this does very much cut across Jesus’ own intentions I am sure – but actually, I’m not sure that this is a scandal that matters all that much in the end, not compared to so many other things that go wrong. What I mean is that – as I discovered through being chair of Churches Together In Mersea for four years – our capacity for working together and simply getting along does not depend upon the doctrinal discussions and debates that take place in the stratosphere – it simply means recognising our common faith in Christ alone, and then slowly, and patiently, working together wherever we can.
Another way of saying this is to say that our unity isn’t something that we can achieve with our own efforts. Rather, our unity is already present – it is a unity which stems from our common baptism and our common confession in Christ alone – and our spiritual path is less to achieve unity than simply to recognise that it is already there – we don’t have to try quite so hard; our strivings can cease.
I have become very fond of a cartoonist who calls himself the naked pastor, and some of his cartoons can be found in the Benefice Bulletin each month. One of his great passions is denouncing “vision”, and I am persuaded that, in the sense he criticises, vision is indeed a deeply damaging thing for a church to pursue. The naked pastor is drawing on some insights that were well articulated by one of my heroes, the German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book ‘Life Together’ – which does exactly what it says on the tin, in that it is all about what it means for Christians to live together. Listen to this:
“God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians with his demands, sets up his own laws, and judges the brethren and God himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of the brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.
When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.
Because God has already laid the only foundation of our fellowship, because God has bound us together in one body with other Christians in Jesus Christ, long before we entered into common life with them, we enter into that common life not as demanders but as thankful recipients. We thank God for giving us brethren who live by his call, by his forgiveness, and his promise. We do not complain of what God does not give us; we rather thank God for what he does give us daily.
And is not what has been given us enough: brothers, who will go on living with us through sin and need under the blessing of his grace? Is the divine gift of Christian fellowship anything less than this, any day, even the most difficult and distressing day?
Even when sin and misunderstanding burden the communal life, is not the sinning brother still a brother, with whom I, too, stand under the Word of Christ? Will not his sin be a constant occasion for me to give thanks that both of us may live in the forgiving love of God in Christ Jesus? Thus, the very hour of disillusionment with my brother becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by the one Word and Deed which really binds us together–the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of Christian fellowship…”
I think that one of the reasons why this resonates so deeply with me is that I am a man prone to visions, of trying to fix things and put things right. What Bonhoeffer is articulating does not, I believe, preclude any attempt at seeking to reform or improve our common Christian life. Rather, what I believe is being described is the right spirit in which to proceed. That is, the right spirit for seeking to develop our common life has to begin by acknowledging the gift of God’s grace in Christ alone – and that, as a result, we begin by responding and co-operating with what God is already doing. We do not have to work quite so hard; our strivings can cease.
I’d like to share another quotation with you that I have found valuable – this one much shorter! One of my favourite authors is the American writer Eugene Peterson – many of you will be familiar with ‘The Message’ which is his translation of the Bible, but most of his writings are about what it means to be a pastor, and I have found him tremendously insightful and helpful as I work out what it means to be a priest in the Church of England today. He is very fond of a quotation from the American novel Moby Dick. Now I should say that I have never read Moby Dick – it’s been on my shelf asking to be read for many years – but I know it is about Captain Ahab chasing a great whale. The quotation which Peterson likes – and which he takes as teaching us something absolutely essential for what it means to be a Christian today – is this: “To insure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from toil.” In other words, if we are truly to carry out the will of God, we have to be rooted in quiet prayer and contemplation, in blessed assurance. We shall not find the will of God by striving through earthquake, wind and fire. Only when we hear the still small voice will we be able to know what it is that God is calling us to do. It is only then that we will be enabled to spend our labour on what actually does satisfy.
In our gospel reading today, Jesus tells us “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” I am starting to believe that when we find ourselves in a state of perpetual weariness, it is a sign that we may be trying too hard spiritually, and we need to remember to ourselves that we love a God of mercy and Sabbath; that there is nothing that we can do to make God love us any more than He already does – or, indeed, any less than He already does. One of the implications of what Bonhoeffer is describing – of accepting our fellow Christians as a gift to us, of realising that we don’t need to achieve a unity but simply recognise the unity that already exists through our common baptism – is that it opens up a space for real and genuine love to emerge. That is, it helps us to love our neighbours as ourselves.
Over the last several years I have taken lots of weddings, and conducted lots of wedding preparation classes, and seen some marriages work, and some marriages fail. One thing that has really been brought home to me from seeing all this is that it is always a mistake to try and change your partner – that is, to try and force a different pattern of behaviour on them. The root problem, I believe, is one of a lack of respect. To seek to force a change in someone is no longer to treat them as a person; rather, they become a means to an end, whatever end that might be. I don’t believe that it is wrong to seek change – but I believe that the way to see that change come about is first to pray, and second, to be the change that you wish to see – to model it, and show what it looks like.
I believe that the same thing applies in our common Christian life together. If we take our baptism seriously then we are yoked to each other in just the way that a married couple is yoked to each other – we are here for the duration. And no doubt it is true that just as within a married couple there are all sorts of ways in which the one spouse infuriates the other, so too there are ways in which we as Christians infuriate each other – and that has led over the centuries to the many different churches. Yet when our common baptism is respected – when the marriage vows are followed – then a wholly different quality of relationship becomes possible. Suddenly there is a safe place within which to grow as a human being – safe, because here there is at least the rumour of unconditional love. A love which isn’t earned as a reward for good behaviour, but simply a gift, a grace. In other words, when we recognise our common baptism, and what it means, then we do not have to work quite so hard; our strivings can cease.
The implication of this, I believe, is that the fundamental Christian category is not whether you are a member of a church, good though that is; it is not whether you are a disciple of Jesus, good though that is; it is not even whether you are a believer, good though that is. I believe that the most fundamental category is the one set out by Jesus as recorded in John’s gospel – which is that of being a friend. I believe that friendship is the most fundamental Christian understanding – a friendship which seeks what is best for the other simply because it is the best for the other. There is no ulterior motive. There is no working out of issues. There is simply a solidarity – a solidarity in suffering, a solidarity in celebration, a simple being alongside one another in sorrow and in joy.
In both our Ecclesiastes and Isaiah readings this morning there is mention of the joy that comes from simple fellowship: “I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live. That everyone may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all his toil – this is the gift of God.” We are greatly blessed in the provisioning of food and drink in this church community, and I do want to pay particular tribute to our social and catering committee, for all their hard work and the wonderful results – some of which we’ll be sampling in a little while. One of my favourite moments in church life is the breakfast on the first Sunday of the month, when people from very diverse services sit down and eat together. That, I believe, is a great blessing, and I see it as having tremendous importance in our common life. Which is why it is so wonderful to be able to say that, very soon, the Lord being our helper, we will have a new kitchen in the church hall and so that element of our fellowship will be reinforced and strengthened. I should add – if we get permission to do the work this summer – I anticipate that the first time that it will be properly used is when Bishop Stephen comes to visit us in September for our Harvest festival. Which is somehow very appropriate, don’t you think?
Of course, the good news on the new kitchen is simply a part of the good news on the financial front generally. Last year, in January, I called together all the members of this church for a service wherein I explained our financial situation. We were running in the red, and had been for several years. The situation was not sustainable – and had become a cause of significant concern. So we did two things. We launched an internal appeal to try and raise our income, coupled with a real look at where we might save money. And we also launched an external appeal to the community to help raise funds towards help with the fabric, joined with the launch of the Friends. I am very happy to be able to tell you that those efforts have been blessed by God, blessed beyond our expectations. Last year – with a very slight rounding – we broke even on our household costs, thanks to the increase in giving from this congregation. We broke even not even including a significant legacy that we received, which has been parked in a separate fund for a rainy day. Thank you for your generosity in such trying economic circumstances – and please don’t stop! I believe that we are now on a sustainable path and I would like especially to thank our financial committee led by Roland for all that they have done to sort out our situation.
More widely, as I am sure you are all fully aware, our appeal to the community has been moving forward – and we are roughly a third of the way towards our eventual target. I would like, in this context, to pay tribute to Kathy Bowman-Dines, who has worked so very hard to get the Friends up and running, with such success both in terms of the events themselves and, of course, in terms of raising money for our necessary fabric works. There are many people who have helped the Friends, with their time and money and effort, inside the church and outside, far too numerous to list, but you know who you are, and I hope you also know that you have done a great service to this church and helped move it towards a happier future.
To talk about moving towards a happier future is implicitly to acknowledge a less happy past. Our reading from Ecclesiastes, famously, says that there is a time for everything and a season for every activity under heaven. I do believe that church life moves in seasons, and my impression is that in this church we have been through a season of winter, which is now passing. I am aware of so many people who have received serious knocks, often in terms of health but also psychologically and spiritually, and I see the financial problems of last year as simply one symptom of a common crisis which touched on all aspects of our life together. I know how much of a struggle it has been for so many people, but I do believe that, as with our finances, so too with our wider life, as a community we are moving into a new season – a season of Spring and new life. Perhaps it was divine promptings that shifted this Annual Meeting to the season of Spring and Easter, when we can shout Alleluia to each other as we share in celebrating the resurrection of Christ. I do think it would be good for us to keep meeting in this season each year. I believe it sends out a true message of where we are – united in our devotion to the risen Lord who has conquered death, and in whom we might rest and find peace; for whom we do not have to work quite so hard; our strivings can cease. At the risk of breaking my own advice against visions, I do believe that we have a very great deal to look forward to, and that this church community can move forward not just with hope but with confident expectation of all that God is doing on our behalf, to bless each of us and to bless our common life together as a church. Rather like Moses I believe that I can see the promised land, and it isn’t very far away. Yet, also rather like Moses, I do not believe that I will be able to get there with you.
After a lot of soul-searching, and having pondered and prayed for some time, I do believe that my time as your Rector is drawing to a close, and that you need a new Rector, a Joshua perhaps, to take you forward into a new season of your life together. I don’t have anything established as yet – and it may well be some time before God actually shows me the place where he wants this slave to go – but I believe that my sharing this understanding with you now will help our on-going conversations and our common life. The truth is that I too am very tired – and as I’ve been saying, I think that this tiredness is a sign that I need to go home to God and find my rest in Him. I, too, need to cease my strivings, and find my rest in Christ alone. To go back to the Moby Dick reference, I do not know what sort of great whale God wishes me to pursue – or, indeed, if, rather than pursuing the whale like Captain Ahab, he instead wants me to be swallowed up by one and thrown up onto a beach somewhere – but I feel as if, in sharing this with you, I am recovering my spiritual balance. There is a modern Christian aphorism which I quite like – if you are going to learn to walk on water you need to get out of the boat. Well, I feel like I’m getting out of the boat, and I’m very nervous, but also excited to see what’s going to happen.
I would like to return to where I began this morning, in talking about taking a service on Easter Sunday at the Methodist church; where the differences were so trivial. Our unity is something that is given to us in Christ alone, not in any effort or achievement on our part. When we can recognise this – and when we can recognise what it means for us simply to be friends in Christ – then we do not have to work quite so hard; our strivings can cease. The ground of our unity is our baptism and so, in accordance with the most ancient church tradition, in this great season of Easter, I would like to invite you now, my friends, please to stand, and reaffirm our baptismal vows.
Going to Eli – the tension between the institutional and the vocational
The prophet Samuel is called at a time when ‘the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions’. Yet clearly the institutional life of the religious establishment continues as before – Eli continues to minister at Shiloh. When Samuel hears the call from God, his instinct is to go to Eli, for this is the way in which his understanding of God has so far been formed. Eli’s reaction is to tell Samuel to go back to sleep. It is only Samuel’s persistent response to God’s calling that breaks through Eli’s habits and assumptions, and then Eli is able to genuinely minister to Samuel, giving him the correct guidance, and midwifing the birth of Samuel’s own distinctive prophetic ministry – a ministry that begins with the pronouncement that Eli’s sons, faithless priests at Shiloh, would soon be dead.
There is much that is worth pondering in this story; what I would like to tease out for now is the tension between the requirements of the sanctuary, and the requirements of responding to God’s call – the tension between the institutional and the vocational.
The circle on the right represents all that it means to respond to God’s call to minister in his name; to find life in serving him and become the person that God calls one to be. It is the path of life in all its fullness. The circle on the left represents all that it means to serve a particular religious institution, whether that be the sanctuary at Shiloh or the church today. Clearly it is God’s intention for those circles to harmonise, so that those called by God to minister in his name are enabled to do so through the life of the institution.
Sometimes, however, God’s intentions are not fulfilled. Sometimes the institution develops in such a way that the glory of the Lord departs from a place or institution. When this happens, continued service to the institution is not necessarily what is called for from the ministers. To do so is to become a Pharisee, one whom Jesus described as those that “nullify the word of God for the sake of [their] tradition.” Clearly this was the situation with Samuel, when the word of the Lord was rare. In such a situation God calls forward the prophets – those whose awareness of vocation is so distinct that they are enabled to speak the word of God independently of the institution, and to criticise the institution from God’s point of view. Put simply, when an institution falls away from true worship, it moves to the left of the picture; in response, God calls prophets to return the institution to the right of the picture. The role of the prophet, paradoxically, is to make it possible for the priest to do their job.
The place of the prophet is not a comfortable one. By definition, the prophet’s role is to come into conflict with the institution, to repudiate its present practices and call those within the institution to repentance. The temptation for the prophet is to collapse into cynicism about the institution, to relish the pronouncements of doom against it, yet to do so is to fail in fulfilling God’s purpose. The role of the prophet is to build up and edify the church, not to tear it down. It is to heal the church and bring it back to a living and active faith, not to arrogate to itself a role as judge and executioner. This is why Jeremiah is so archetypal – his love for the people of Israel abided throughout his ministry.
Where are we now in the Church of England? I am aware of far too many cases where the priorities of the institution have been catered for at the expense of individual vocations. When this happens, the minister either endures a life of quiet desperation or else falls out of ministry completely, normally through ill-health of one sort or another, or early retirement, or by seeking refuge in a non-parish role (the numbers of which multiply exceedingly). This is part of the inheritance of Anglican Christendom – Herbertism – and this is what has to be repudiated.
What, specifically, might this mean? I think, for me, it means questioning the perceived institutional needs, in the name of God. For example, the financial predicament of the Church of England, linked to the ongoing decline in numbers, provokes mortal terror in the heart of the existing establishment (apparently). There is then a subsequent push towards growth, using (often) business and management techniques – for they, obviously, are the very models of successful institutions. I see this as ‘going to Eli’, when what the church most needs is to say ‘speak Lord, for your servant is listening’. That is, the very root of our problems is a turning away from God and a being captured by worldly agendas. More worldly concerns will not lead us out of our morass. More visions and agendas and bright ideas are not what we need. Our path is and can only be one of renewed faithfulness and humble waiting upon God. It may be that in his infinite wisdom God has decided that the particular institution called the Church of England has outlived its usefulness as a vessel for enabling the spread of the gospel. I hope not – but the only hope for the Church is if we return to our spiritual centre, and remember what it means to be human.
It feels very odd…
…to actually hold it in my hand.
So that was 2011
2011 was a year of extremes, highs and lows.
Some of the lows:
Ollie snapped the ligaments in both knees
My therapist and spiritual director died of a sudden heart attack
The voices finally succeeded in getting under my skin
Sold the boat
Some of the highs:
Taking my eldest to Greenbelt
Giving up therapy(!)
Recognising how much I have to be thankful for, and starting to just enjoy them all
Holiday with friends
Developing some iron in the soul, and making some core decisions
Seeing some clear fruit from long-term work in the parish
Starting up the Learning Church sequence again after a two year break, and receiving some of the most positive feedback ever
Christmas – one of the best ever (personally!)
Sold the boat, and bought a dinghy
Went Primal – diet first, exercise next – which is really suiting me
Haven’t mentioned the book – I expect that to figure for 2012, from January onwards 😉
Previous years: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010.